


Plow Around the Bones

by scioscribe



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Redemption, Roughly Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 10:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14518872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Loki Odinson, I have never known what you are.  I still do not.  I saw potential.”“And now?”“Still,” Heimdall said, “potential.”Loki scoffed.  “Potential is for the province of children.”“That is true.  But you depend upon it, and now more than ever.  If we look at what you have done, well, that is one matter.  The question is what youwilldo.  And that I don’t know—your brother’s character, your sister’s, they were fixed some time ago.  Perhaps shapeshifters do not have an easy time of settling into their own forms.”





	Plow Around the Bones

**Author's Note:**

> References to past Loki/Grandmaster dubcon.
> 
> Approximately canon-compliant if you imagine a longer break between the last main scene of _Ragnarok_ and the stinger featuring the arrival of Thanos's ship.

The trouble with this infernal ship, Loki thought, was there was no way to be alone.  All their sleeping quarters were rotated, with half the ship on an entirely separate schedule; after hours of meaningless, draining consultation with what passed for Thor’s governing council, he retired to a bedroom that stank of someone else’s sweat and was half-covered in someone else’s clothes.  All he wanted was an hour or two to himself, and what did he have instead?  The mire of lecture, all on account of having foolishly sought privacy in a room where Heimdall was, as it turned out, already doing the same.  Not that he seemed to _value_ that privacy enough to allow Loki to leave him to it.

He so disliked this grinding politesse, but he disliked even more the idea of dying because his reputation caused some halfwit to mistake courtesy for betrayal.  Until they gained more space and security, he was condemned to carefulness.

He was not unaware that he was on what was surely his last, best chance.  He didn’t want to scupper it.  What Heimdall said of him, to Thor and to the others, would matter.  So he stayed.

“You’ve been prowling around like a cornered animal,” Heimdall said.

“I’m so glad we get these chances to talk.”

With Heimdall, at least, he did not have to pretend to sweetness—Heimdall would only distrust him further if he did—he only had to have self-control and some paltry amount of bow-and-scrape humility.  Did that make Heimdall better or worse company than others?

“I went to your father once,” Heimdall said.

So: worse, then.

“I was growing tired,” he continued.  “My reflexes were perhaps not what they should have been, my vision not what it once was.  Allow me, I said, to train my successor.”

“Allow _me_ to guess,” Loki said.  “You would not have chosen Skurge.”

He could not accustom himself to Heimdall’s eyes, which had been growing steadily browner over the last few days.  For centuries, those golden hawk’s eyes had watched him with untroubled disapproval; to see the color mostly gone the way of the Bifrost disturbed him.  Were they to lose every part of Asgard?  He should relish Heimdall’s diminishment but, the circumstances being what they were, he couldn’t work up anything more than the smallest, bitterest bit of joy; a fleck of lemon rind that soon disappeared from his tongue.

Heimdall said, “I asked for you.”

“Oh, I see.  If you can’t be Gatekeeper of the Bifrost, you’ll take it upon yourself to be Thor’s court jester.  I hate to tell you, there’s steep competition.  You’ll need better material.”

The corners of Heimdall’s mouth moved just barely.  “This was a long time ago, of course, and you were even younger then than you are now—”

That was too much to swallow.  “I am not _young_ , I am entirely—”

“—but you had already shown your mother’s gift for sorcery.  Indeed, you had more magic in you than any Asgardian I had seen in at least two millennia.”

Oh, it never ceased to surprise him, the way they could always find another way to strike at him.  He smiled a hard smile.  “Because I was not one.  But you didn’t know.”

“Do you really think that?  I opened the way for Odin to come back from Jotunheim with you in his arms.”

Surprise settled in his throat like a stone.  It somehow hurt to speak around it.  “Then you always knew what I was.  What I am.”

Heimdall laughed.  He had a dry, husky laugh; Loki was spitefully glad that Heimdall was so humorless he did not often ask people to suffer through hearing it.  “Loki Odinson, I have never known what you are.  I still do not.  I saw potential.”

“And now?”

“Still,” Heimdall said, “potential.”

Loki scoffed.  “Potential is for the province of children.”

“That is true.  But you depend upon it, and now more than ever.  If we look at what you have done, well, that is one matter.  The question is what you _will_ do.  And that I don’t know—your brother’s character, your sister’s, they were fixed some time ago.  Perhaps shapeshifters do not have an easy time of settling into their own forms.”

Was it for him to question how Heimdall came to show him mercy?  Maybe not, _probably_ not.  But he wanted to argue even though he lacked a premise for it.  Still, he held his tongue.  Had he not already traded dignity for forgiveness?  What an appalling thought.

“You are an easy person to distract,” Heimdall said, with that same dry amusement.  “You should be careful of that in battle.  You find too great enjoyment in thinking of yourself.”

“Not always,” Loki said.

Heimdall nodded at that.  “No.  Not always.”

“I also dwell too much on the past,” Loki said, allowing his voice to grow expansive, parodic.  “Luxuriating in slights done to me while I ask others to overlook attempted—well, et cetera, et cetera.  But here you go, without a care for that, bringing me back to my childhood of all places.”

“I asked for you,” Heimdall said, undeterred, “and I thought that it might... steady you.  That it would do you good to have a place where your tricks were necessary, useful.  Where you would not be in competition with your brother.  But those were all secondary concerns.  I thought primarily of Asgard itself.”

“To keep me safely from the throne, and content with my place.”

“To give my home a worthy guardian when I was gone.”

“What questionable judgment,” Loki said, trying to keep his tone light.  Did it matter?  It couldn’t matter, it was too long ago to matter, and it hadn’t happened—how could something that hadn’t happened matter?  It was a question for either a philosopher or a physicist and he was neither.  “I can almost guarantee you that I had already spoiled on the vine.  I can _know_ that you’re telling me all this now only because there _is_ no more Bifrost.  It’s not like you would have come  _now_ to me in the halls of Asgard and said, ‘Oh, Loki _Laufeyson_ , come, let me choose some gaudy color for your eyes and teach you how to see everything in the Nine Realms, I’m sure that will go well.’”

“That’s true.  The day in which I would have gladly taught you how to see that far passed a long time ago.”

“Everyone is saying things like that to me these days,” Loki said.  “I think it must have been in some saga I’m not remembering that everyone’s quoting when they want to feel profound.”

“You are talking to put distance between my story and the only question you could have about it,” Heimdall said, “as if you will forget it, but you won’t.  You, of all people, forget nothing.”

“Fine, then,” Loki said, his jaw stiff.  “What did _Odin_ say when you asked for me as your apprentice?  Did he begin laughing immediately or did he draw it out for suspense?”

“He didn’t laugh.”

“No, I suppose he never had the self-awareness.”

“You always think you’ll anger me, speaking poorly of your father,” Heimdall said.  “It’s unlikely.  I saw his conquering of the Nine Realms and his banishment of Hela.  With so much blood on his hands already, what can it matter what you think of him?  I have thought worse.”

“I sincerely doubt that.”

“Believe as you like.”

“Then you would faithfully serve one murderer, one traitor to his family, but not another,” Loki said.  “Well, huzzah for you, Heimdall, for seeing some invisible distinction between me and my father.”

“There is his success, for one,” Heimdall said.

“That’s catty of you.  I think that’s my job.  It doesn’t suit you.”

“Believe this, if nothing else.  Whatever insight into himself the All-Father lacked, or whatever he found too late, I was unable to avoid.  A hazard of seeing too much for too long.  And, before you can prolong this interminable conversation still further, what Odin said, when I asked for you, was that it would not do.”

His smile was a like a knife turned to cut his mouth open, to force an expression onto his face.  “I’m sure it would not.”

“He said that there might come a day when you would need to rule and that the vision that I had, the vision that I was offering you, would be counterproductive for a king of Asgard.  He asked if I wanted to drive you mad.  How were you to act when you could never close your eyes to consequences?  You would be frozen.”

“Frost Giant jokes.  Very droll.”

“When he looked at you, your father saw a prince who might become a king,” Heimdall said.  “Sometimes, maybe wrongly, he thought that meant you should know less than a prince who might not.”

“Well, that explains my brother’s frankly astonishing ignorance of—”

Something in Heimdall’s expression stopped him.

“When I hear you speak poorly of your brother,” Heimdall said, “that I do dislike.  I cannot think of a better way to make you hate him than by telling you that you should be grateful to him, so that I will not do, but I don’t have to listen to you, Silvertongue.  On this subject in particular, you are rusting.”

“I don’t hate him,” Loki said.   _His is the only hand I can bear on the back of my neck, even for a little while._

“But in the end,” Heimdall said, going on as if Loki had never spoken, “you saw both too much and too little.”

“What a long story to have such a short point at the end of it.  I did think in the middle there that you were doing some kind of ‘your father always loved you, he just didn’t know how to show it’ routine, so this was at least surprising, but not, I’m afraid, surprising enough to make up for amount of time I have spent sitting here.”

“Your father showed he loved you often,” Heimdall said.  “As I said, you saw too little.  But he could not see—would not see—that you did not know it.  Or the consequences of that.”

Loki said, “He thought if he looked at me too closely, he would see what he already knew was underneath my skin.  And the outside, he must have thought, was surely bad enough.  Tricks and guile rather than strength.  All I was good at, he hated— _that_ is why he wanted blinders on me, because he would rather I be a half-rate prince, a half-wit king than someone not like him.  Love, not love, I really don’t care, but I never had his _respect_.”

He had said too much.  And to Heimdall of all people.  His face was hot.

“No,” Heimdall said, almost gently.  “You did not.  But you may still have your brother’s.  And mine.”

He almost laughed.  “Never.”

“Not my love, Loki.  Not my good opinion.  But you ruled reasonably.”

“Aside from framing you for dereliction of duty.”

“Aside from that,” Heimdall agreed with a smile, as if it were a fond memory of some puppy who had nipped his finger.  “You have enough understanding of chaos to make order from it.  Maybe what you have lacked, all along, is activity.  While you wore your father’s skin, you were not wholly unworthy of his crown.  And you came home.  You brought us this.”  He reached out and touched one drab, ugly wall with as much affection as if it had been a marble pillar.  “Like I said, I look always for what will serve Asgard.  This is not what we had anticipated, but it will do.  It might be the same with the man who brought her to us.”

“You ramble,” Loki said.  He stood, and brushed off his breeches even though there was nothing on them.  “And you’ve grown sentimental in your old age.  Excuse me.”  He inclined his head to Heimdall without knowing why, and having done it embarrassed him so much that he went out the door so quickly he collided with Thor, who was coming in.

“It’s not like you to be clumsy,” Thor said.

“It’s not like you to be quiet,” Loki snapped.

“Is something the matter?”

“What?  No, of course not, why?  Heimdall has just been telling me that I ruled wisely and well.”

Thor frowned.  “Not to cast aspersions, brother, but didn’t you have him banished from the realm?”

“ _Thank_ you,” Loki said.  “That’s what I was saying.”

Thor seemed to consider this for a moment before shaking his head and dismissing it.  “Do you have to go?  I wanted the both of you anyway.”

“He can stay,” Heimdall said.  “He was only going off to sulk.”

“I was not going to sulk, I was going to _think_ , or I would have been if I could find any damn peace here!”

Heimdall’s expression suggested he considered this little more than a temper tantrum thrown by a child— _potential_ , Loki thought disconcertingly—and Thor’s…  Thor had little expression at all.  He was as gray-faced as their father had been at the end of his life, or very nearly so.  It showed less on him, unless one had Loki’s own eye for weakness, because the god of thunder always carried with him a certain useful spark of lightning’s vivacity, but underneath his innate glamour, there was only exhaustion.

If he died—if he died while Loki was still favored in the eyes of the people, still the savior of Asgard—

 _Your mind is a knife you have honed too sharp_ , he told himself.  _Like your smile._ _You will cut yourself with it if you are not careful._

He sighed.  “I am, as always, at my king’s service.”

“Mm.  Love the words, not sure of the motive behind them.  Though that is typical for you.  What would you say about not going to Earth after all?”

“Why, did you finally learn what world that talking slug is from?  I’m predisposed toward it already: I like planets less interested in killing me on sight.”

“You’re difficult to kill,” Heimdall said.  “Find comfort in that.   _Do_ you have some particular place in mind, my lord?  Midgard has its advantages; it has affection for you.”

“You always have been _so_ lovable,” Loki said.

“We might go to where Hela was,” Thor said.

It was all he could do not to blanch at the mere word.  “You’re mad.  You’ve been drinking with the Valkyrie and all you have in your head is beer and mead.”

“Norns, I wish that were true.  I haven’t had a decent drink in what feels like a month.  I haven’t even found the liquor cabinets here yet.”

“Then allow me to demonstrate my loyalty so you have a higher respect for my counsel.”  He walked along the wall of the room until he heard the telltale hollowness beneath him and then stamped his foot twice and hopped off the rising shelf as it emerged from the floor.  Before it was even to its full height, he had chosen a bottle off it and tossed it to his brother. “There.  Don’t see I never gave you anything.  Honestly, for good taste, you really can’t beat a dictatorial hedonist.”

Thor uncorked the bottle with his teeth, vulgarly, and spat the stopper halfway across the room before taking a long, enthusiastic pull.  “I owe you a second hug.  How did you know that was there?”

“There’s one in every common area of the ship.  The Grandmaster, if you must know, racked one up to half its height and bent me over one of them.”  He looked around the room, assessing its measurements.  “Not this one.  Well, not even this ship, actually, but not in this room’s equivalent, I mean.  The one I was on before your arrival was better decorated.  In that it had actual décor.  I hate to think what went on in this one that they had to pull out half the furnishings.”

Thor was only looking at him.  “If I must know?”

“What?”

“You’ve never hesitated before to brag of a conquest.  If you had such a man in your bed, why not brag about it before now?”

“Because it was his bed and not mine,” Loki said irritably.  “His ship and his arena and so on.  Must we do this now?”

It was calculated, of course, he only resented that he was in the position where he needed to make such a humiliating disclosure, even for his own advantage.  But Thor had always been—protective.  The truth was an embarrassment, but it was an embarrassment that would incline Thor to treat him like he was a newborn kitten for at least long enough for Loki to beg tearfully—and he could make himself both beg and cry if necessary, he thought grimly—to leave this idea of Hel.  Thor would say yes then.  He had to.

Heimdall looked at him in the most unbearable manner, as if he saw through the thin tissue of this manipulation but felt sorry for him nonetheless.

Not his love, not his good opinion, but his respect.  Unless he had just forfeited that.  Not because of what he'd done, but because of how he would use it.

He breathed in sharply.  “Brother, you never did understand any joke with any sophistication.”

Thor scrutinized him.  “You spoke—only in jest?”

He would never have been able to get away with this if Thor were at his best, but he was not, not with so little sleep and so much responsibility, not with the grief that hung over them all.  He shrugged.  “Trust me enough to believe that I could attend a party without being the main attraction.  But as far as humor goes, it was ill-conceived.  I forgot you grew prudish on Midgard.  Thor, I hereby solemnly promise that I won the Grandmaster’s favor only by dint of my charming personality.”

He could see the suspicion ebb from Thor’s face and, watching it, he felt the awful mingling of love and resentment that was always there in his dealings with his brother.  He couldn’t look at Heimdall.

“Then all that aside, I am grateful for the drink.  But if you think it will distract me from Hel, you’re sorely mistaken.”

“There are a dozen reasons not to take our people to Hel.  The name, for one thing.  Literally everything else, for another.”

“It's empty.  We have more right to it than we do to Midgard.”

“Yes, we all do have the right to die.  And be dead.”

“Your brother is right,” Heimdall said.  To Loki, of course, and not to Thor.  “It is a world like any other.  We considered Hel the world of the dead because it was the place of banishment for the goddess of death.  Not because it was some dark twin to Valhalla.”

“Hang on,” Thor said.  “I know this is a stretch, but we don’t have another, nicer secret sister named Halla, do we?”

Heimdall smiled.  “One does not plaster over the good.”

It was a comment that, however neutral, made Loki intensely aware of his own mask, as if the wrong move would cause this Aesir form to flake off him like paint, revealing the blue underneath.  No.  One did not plaster over the good.  He looked down at his hands, but they maintained their usual shape and color, their veins the only blue.  “Nor does one exile an enemy of the throne to a paradise.  If Hel were habitable in the ordinary sense, it would have had ordinary inhabitants.”

Heimdall said, “But it did, once.”

Even in such close company, Thor gave away no more of his horror than he did of his exhaustion: a slight tightness to his jaw.   _Oh, brother, how time has changed you.  Once you would already be raging in anger or disbelief_.  He did not think that he would have come to a time when Thor could be so unsurprised by the bloody sins of Asgard that he could hear of them and show only indifference; still less than that had he thought such a time would have come that it would sadden him to see it.

And now, he surprised himself from moment to moment, because he took on the words not because he relished them but because he did not want Thor to have to say them.  “How many souls were there on Hel when Odin made it his daughter’s prison?”

Heimdall met his eyes.  The thinnest remaining circle of gold, his own unaided power, was still sufficient to unnerve.  “It was a thinly settled world, with poor technology.  Most children did not live, and those who lived long enough to bear and father children of their own still lived mayfly lives to us, mayfly lives to all the other peoples of the Nine Realms.  I did not count their number, I only watched their faces as they died, slaughtered in Hela’s fury, and remember them still.”

 _But more than I killed on Earth_ , Loki thought.   _More than that by far, exponentially more, no matter how short their lives and how scattered their little civilizations, yet Odin sat in judgment of me._

Thor said quietly, “It would have been a place under our protection.  They were innocent lives.  How could he have done it?”

“There was no other place.  Your father could not have created the seal he did if the land had not belonged to us.”

“So confine her to a dungeon!  A city!  A continent!”

“She could have shattered a continent,” Heimdall said.  “She could not shatter a world.  Even her rage and power were not so great as that.”

“Then he should have killed her,” Thor said.

“Perhaps.”

“Odin defeated and banished Surtur, and it was Surtur we raised to slay her,” Loki said.  “Do not tell us he could not have rid himself of the work of his own cock and balls if he’d really wanted to.”

“She was his daughter,” Heimdall said.  “His firstborn child and, then, his only.”  He looked to Thor.  “How many lives would you let your brother take before you decided that no number saved would allow him to sit in your council?  Because he has taken them, and yet here he sits, a prince of Asgard still.  How many before you ceased to ever trust him?  Before you would try to imprison him?  And how many lives, my lord, would your brother have to end before you rid him of his own?”

Again, in the silence, Loki took up what Thor himself could not.  “Technically, of course, he has imprisoned me already.  So we could actually run the figures on that.  As far as death goes, what say you, brother?  An even hundred?  Or could you spare me another score of innocents, if you were in good humor?”  He felt a dagger slip into his hand, coming not from his sleeve but his skin, as if he were made of needles.

Heimdall saw it.

“I don’t think I would count against your total, Loki,” he said calmly.  “I have not been innocent for a very long time.  And I did not speak as I did to draw your brother into acting against you.  My wish would be that he not.”

“And _my_ wish would be that you never speak to my brother, your _king_ , like that again.”  Even he didn’t know precisely what he meant by that.  Don’t talk to Thor in such a way that might hurt his feelings?   _That_ would be a pathetic command indeed.  Don’t accuse him as you never accused our father?  Don’t draw his attention to how fundamentally misguided he is to still hold me close?

“Peace, Loki,” Thor said, saving him the trouble of interpreting himself.  “He’s not wrong.”

“You were not there for it,” Heimdall said.  “But the history of Asgard belongs to Asgard and lives with us still.  And those who would rule, who have that right through blood, must claim all the blood that comes with it, then and now.  You will always do more harm and more good than most.  Your father erred, and it haunted him—it made him determined to act more quickly when he thought Hela had come again.”

“No, he was already dead by then.”

“He means me,” Loki said.  He pinched the bridge of his nose, a motion he had, he realized with a shudder, acquired from Banner.  “All of this is philosophy, and governance is not philosophy.  Or not at this level, anyway.  Save questions of guilt or innocence or blame until you may build a new dungeon and put me in it if you can, but in the meantime, nothing we’re talking about here will give food or shelter to our people.   _What_.”

Thor was smiling at him, looking a little less weary for the first time since their meeting had begun.  “Nothing, it’s just that hearing you speak on civics is somewhat endearing.  And very, very strange.  But you’re right—if we carry on in this way, we’ll resolve nothing.  Heimdall, when you knew it, what kind of world was Hel?”

“More akin to Midgard than to home.  A patchwork place of many climes.  Much of it was ocean and many of its people were fisher-folk.”

“There you go,” Loki said.  “We had little ocean.  No one here can fish.  Oh, well, scratch that, we tried, on to the next planet.”

“We can learn to fish.”

“Fishing is hard.”

“Fishing is easy.”

Loki took a gamble.  “You’ve never fished.”

“Very well, bluff called.  Heimdall, what has Hel besides oceans?”

“Land,” Heimdall said.

“See, brother,” Thor said.  “There’s land.”

“This is your subtle plan to revenge yourself upon me,” Loki said.  “With your idiotic Revengers.  What _kind_ of land, Heimdall?  Grassland?  Desert?  Snow and mountains?”

“I believe I said varied climes.  My suggestion would be that we settle in an area with arable farmland, mild weather, and some seasonal changes.”

“Excellent,” Loki said.  “We’ll plow around the bones our dear sister left in the ground.”

But he could already see that he had lost the chance to persuade Thor to abandon the notion of settling on Hel.  Of course he had.  Whatever governance was, the business of giving counsel was the business of war, with each conversation among Thor’s inner circle a battle for Thor’s next decision.  In war, one did not give up an advantage merely because the enemy looked _disapproving_.  He might have won on sentiment, but he would lose on reason, because, unless Heimdall were gloriously, wonderfully wrong about everything, there was no real reason _not_ to settle on Hel.  They lacked the current means to begin rebuilding their cities, but they could find them, and in the meantime, the Aesir were hardy and long-lived, well-able to withstand a few years of rough living for a good cause.  They would nearly all of them be strangers to Earth, so why should they not prefer an empty world?

Eight of the Nine Realms spoke of ghosts, but of course almighty Asgard had to be above such superstitions.

“It is true that Midgard can barely go a moment between crises,” Heimdall said.

“I’m sure my friends do their best,” Thor said defensively.  “It’s just an unlucky place.”

Loki almost started to ask if the plan to steer wide of Earth had come about because of the breaking of his brother’s tie with Jane Foster, but bit down on his tongue just in time.  It would not be helpful.  And then there was that newfound strain in Thor's face, as if their bedraggled realm were a newborn babe forced into his arms.  He didn’t want to worsen things.

Thor knew him too well to not know that his silence was the best he could do to acquiesce politely to a plan he did not like.  He patted Loki once or twice on the arm, as if consoling a lamed horse.  “All we will do at first is look.  If it’s not to be, it’s not to be.”

“And we are, amazingly, back to philosophy,” Loki said with a sigh.  All he wanted now was to retreat: he did not believe in remaining on the battleground to lick his wounds in plain view.  “If you are through ignoring my argument, Thor, may I go?”  He pointedly did not ask Heimdall’s permission because he didn’t need it and couldn’t have stomached getting it.

*

It took him twelve minutes after that to think of going to go look for the Valkyrie, and that was at least ten minutes longer than it should have taken.  He charitably blamed his slowness on the general and constant presence of _everything_.

He found her sparring with one of the weighted leather bags that Banner had improvised.

“That must be an unsatisfying opponent.”

“Oh, would that it were you,” she said.  It was not her answer that made him doubtful this conversation would go any better than the one before it—who better than a liar to know how often someone’s words were irrelevant?—but everything else.  She was soaked through with sweat just from this ridiculous false fighting.  Even he would have done better, and he did not undertake warrior’s work often.  She looked as tired as Thor, without the excuse of kingship or the disguise of the glamour.

The Valkyrie shifted constantly around the bag, her eyes fixed upon it.  A muscle in her cheek leapt spasmodically.  “Tell me what you want or else go.  Or fight me yourself.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t dare.”

“You’re a fucking liar.”

“You must have missed that that is, in fact, one of my nicknames.”  More accurately, it was not, as the name had been coined to be spoken openly in his father’s halls, but he felt no compunction to tell the truth about how people accused him of lying.

“Why would someone nickname you after something you do so badly?  Is it supposed to be ironic?  Like saying you’re a gifted lover?”

He ignored that.  “My brother has changed our destination.”

“All right.”  She turned and kicked the bag, leaving a pale scuff of a shoe-mark on it.  She should have been tearing through the leather entirely.  “That’s not anything to me.”

“It should be.  He wishes us to settle Hel.”

“He’s in for a disappointment, then,” she said without so much as a blink.  “The last time I saw it, it wasn’t so pretty, and Hela wasn’t the fixer-upper type.”  She wiped off her brow with the back of her hand.  “You’re telling me all this, I’m sure without his permission, because you think I won’t want to go back to where my friends were slaughtered.  But I’m not like you, prince.”

“True.  I never was one for friends.”

That won him a sudden, harsh smile.  “I’ll believe that.”  But she didn’t say what she had meant.

Loki, having just been subjected at length to Heimdall’s less-than-flattering opinion of him, was not inclined to ask.  “I would seek you as an ally in persuading Thor to hold to Earth as our destination.”

“And I would decline.”  That was the first time she really looked at him, and he saw that despite all her strain, there was still a hot spark of life in her eyes.  To the best of his recollection, it had not been there on Sakaar, where she had been boozy and indifferent.  Thor’s handiwork.  “Why do you even give a damn?  I thought Midgard wanted to string you up by your heels and cut your throat like a pig’s.  On Hel there’s no one to hate you but the people on this ship, and that’s a more manageable number.”

“Maybe I’m concerned for how people will feel, set down as they are to rebuild in a charnel house.”

“I don’t think so.  I don’t think being concerned about how people feel is exactly in your line.”

“I don’t have to justify myself,” Loki said.  “Not to you.”

“Fair enough.  But don’t expect me to help you.”

 _Don’t tell Thor I asked you_ , he almost said, but there would be no quicker way to guarantee that she would.  And he thought that, left to her own devices, she wouldn’t, no more than she had, for all her dislike of him, spread word of how he had earned the Grandmaster’s fickle regard.

“I preferred you stripped of your honor,” he said instead.  “You were so much more fun.”

“And I would prefer you if you had any in the first place.”  She delivered another series of blows, her footwork sloppy enough for him to at last realize what was the matter with her.

And it _shouldn’t_ have been the matter with her, for she had been to the parties as much as he had.  She knew where the Grandmaster kept his liquor.  It was stowed away for space, not for secrecy, and even if it had been a privilege reserved to only a few, the Grandmaster _liked_ her.  There was no way she didn’t know the layout of this place far better than he did.  She was ceasing to drown her sorrows, and she was ceasing deliberately rather than by necessity.

“This is so ridiculous,” he said.  “You could have told me.”  He flicked his fingers at her lazily and color poured back into her face like a drop of ink spreading across paper.

The Valkyrie’s lips parted as the absence of craving sunk in.

“You’re welcome,” Loki said.

She struck him so hard across the face that he felt a tooth loosen in his mouth: it took another nudge of magic to affix it again.  But no power could keep him from wearing the bruise.  She had meant the blow too much for that, and violence had its own power that he couldn’t contravene.

“ _Ow_.”

“I did not give you the right of that,” she said.  “I didn’t request your aid, nor need it.  I would not lower myself to ask for scraps of healing from the most traitorous son of Asgard.”

He smiled.  Because of the blow, it hurt him to do it.  “I am no son of Asgard.”

She ignored that so completely it was as though she had not even heard it.  “I _need_ to remember how hard this is, so I can better keep myself from needing to suffer through it again.”

“I took the need _from_ you, you ungrateful—”

“You took the _pain_ of it, you idiot,” she said.  “Not the need.  I made that part of my soul a long time ago.”

What could he say?  That he had been trying to be kind?  That was hardly true, and she did not have to know him well to know it.  He had healed her because he had been impatient with the sight of her sickness and because some part of him had calculated—obviously miscalculated—that she would take his side if he did so.

Mischief, mischief, always mischief.  He knew no straight roads and no pure intentions, or if he did, he’d forgotten them.  He put his hand to the scuff mark she had left on the leather bag.  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.  I too have changes to my soul that I can’t unmake.”

*

Banner said no.  Or, more accurately, Banner said, “No, Thor.  No way.  I spent two years stuck as the other guy and stuck in _gladiatorial combat_ , I fought your sister, I fought a giant wolf, I’m in space, I’m somehow part of the government of a culture _I don’t even belong to_ —fine.  Sure.  But you are my ride home.  You do not get to decide, halfway to getting me there, that we’re just going to make a quick detour to somewhere else.”

“This display of temper—” Heimdall began.

Thor cut him off.  “I assure you, we have not yet seen his display of temper.  Nor do we wish to.”

The Valkyrie said, “That’s what brings out the big guy, huh?”  She sounded almost wistful, as though the beast was some overgrown mutt she had had to leave behind.

Banner closed his eyes, a long trace of green flaring up along his neck and then fading again.  Small wonder.  Loki, who despite his appreciation for such strong (if unwitting) support from such an unexpected quarter was wary enough of the Banner’s anger to stay out of the conversation entirely, had been where he was, discussed and dissected from all angles as an unpredictable liability.  It was trying.  Banner was a lock well-tended to indeed to stay as calm as he was.

“There is really not a lot between us and cold hard vacuum right now,” Banner said.  “You do know that.  There are kids here.  Why are you risking this?”

“Because I would give them a home as soon as possible.”

“You know who really appreciates homes?  The living.”

The Valkyrie’s nostalgia evaporated.  “You threaten us?”

“He warns us,” Loki said.  Why was he involving himself?  Because he was there, he supposed.  “He knows himself well enough to know what will break him and he knows what the consequences of that might be.  Would that we were all so insightful.”

Banner looked at him with an unreadable expression.  “Yeah.  That’s what I’m saying.”

Thor said, “Maybe I trust you more than you trust yourself.”

Banner never took his eyes off Loki.  “No offense, but you trust a lot of people you shouldn’t.”

If he were a true prince of Asgard, the Valkyrie would have risen to his defense as well.  Thor was not the only one who had put his hair in braids as a boy and proclaimed himself a Valkyrie-to-be; they had both done it.  They both knew the oaths that were taken and the blood that went into the ink of their tattoos.  No slight against the royal line, except that it be from the royal line, could ever be borne.  But he no longer qualified for that protection, if indeed he ever had.

He hated Banner for having sins that were so blamelessly explained and so easily prevented.  How many had fallen at his hands in the arena and were never spoken of in this company?  How would Loki even deliver such a warning about himself: _Keep me close, brother, confide in me, prefer me to all others and have everyone else do the same.  Give me power and glory and love, lest I—_

If he could not do without such a caution as that, he would have done well to meet his end in defense of Asgard.  Or to now snuff his life out like a candle.

The silence was not long, only significant.  Loki himself broke it, to save Thor the obligation of choosing a false brother over a true friend, of ignoring good counsel.  “Brother, it does us no harm to prolong our trip by the paltry amount of time it would take to honor a promise to your friend and our ally.”  Be the showman.  He was Loki Liesmith, was he not?  He could at least pretend to dignity.  “Heimdall, the distance is little enough, isn't it?”

The Valkyrie snorted.  “I like that you talked about what a short trip it would be before you had any clue about it.”  She sounded not unfriendly, which was rich considering how she sprung up to speak in favor of brats she had probably never spoken to and yet had not said a word in his favor.

“True,” he said with a brittle smile.  “It is part of my general untrustworthiness.”

“Brother—”

“No,” Heimdall said, though it was a crime to interrupt the king.  “It would add no more than a week to our journey, and we have both food and fuel enough to do that without any trouble.”

“And lube enough,” the Valkyrie said.

There was a flicker of humor around Heimdall’s mouth.  “As you say.  The ship’s stores are quite thorough.”

“Wait, what?” Banner said, wheeling around to look at the Valkyrie.  “Is this like _Love Boat_ or something?”

She shrugged.  “The Grandmaster was a man of many pleasures, and he could afford to satiate them.”

Oh, good, they could all talk about this for a while.  That was fun.

He had not _intended_ to offer himself to the Grandmaster—though if he were to be absolutely honest with himself, despite all the reasons he shouldn’t be, he most likely would have ended up doing it anyway.  But he had landed on Sakaar with the long echo of the scream of the Void in his ears, his father dead, his brother gone, and his head dazed.  He had been unable to summon so much as a projection of a butterfly, let alone anything impressive enough to claim power in his own right.  Fighter or food?  Someone had measured his arm with a band of tape and clucked their tongue; measured him elsewhere and whistled their approval.  “Food,” they had said.  “Definitely food.  Succulent.”

When they had reached the Grandmaster’s palace, a second choice had been presented to him, this one by someone less interested in dictating his answer.  “You’re food, right?  Are you for filleting or fucking?”

Loki had assessed this choice for perhaps a microsecond.  “Fucking.”

It wasn’t like the Grandmaster had been an unpleasant man to bed, though certainly the circumstances had been… less than ideal.  But he’d not been left to live in filth like some animal and when he had gone to the arena, he had not gone there to die.  And he’d made the transition from just another lay to a pampered favorite quite quickly.  Thor had been right to think he would have done well on Sakaar if he had stayed.

He did not wish that he had stayed, though, and that was _not_ the kind of thinking that would have elevated him on such a world.  There was that.

This was their chosen distraction from the more pressing issue of what was to be done about their guest, and he could sympathize with the need to relieve the tension in the room.   _Look_ , he thought spitefully, as if the Valkyrie could hear him.   _Look at me considering the feelings of others._

“I just didn’t think anyone needed more than one orgy spaceship,” Banner said.  “But, okay, this does explain why my bed has a Magic Fingers setting.”

“There is no real humor here,” Heimdall said, surprising him.  “No more than there was in the fights to the death.”

“There was a little bit of humor in the fight to the death,” Thor said.  “I made jokes.  I’m sure people laughed.  Loki, you were there, you must have heard them.”

“Yes.  All of us found it immensely amusing when Banner’s monster beat you against the ground like you were a chicken in a sack.”

Banner frowned in a genuinely distracted way, as if someone other than Loki had said this.  “I think you may be killing chickens wrong.  Wait, Asgard had chickens?”

“We wanted for very little,” Thor said.  His voice was soft.  “Certainly not for henhouses.  But the kitchens burned with the aviaries burned with the libraries.  And—and,” now sharpening, now the voice of the man who had not just cleverly tagged Loki with one of the Valkyrie’s shockers but also ruthlessly left him to suffer through his just deserts, “somehow, it occurs to me, my brother did not burn along with it.  Though you were there, weren’t you, Loki?  Right at the center where Surtur rose.  How does it happen that you’re now here?”

This was not his day, was it?  If he burned, he wanted to burn with anger: that Thor would question him on this at all, that he would do it in front of others, that he would do it in a voice that sounded strangely close to Odin’s.  But he wasn’t angry, only hollow.  Where was his quarrel, truthfully?  Even he had agreed that he was not to be trusted.  Why shouldn’t Thor suddenly doubt the circumstances that had led to his brother’s glorious rescue of their people?  Why shouldn’t all of them come to wonder if he had spun some deception?  If he had made a deal with Hela and raised up an illusion of Ragnarok, caked with blood and flame, ensuring her reign and his own power?  If he'd thought of that sooner, he might well have done it.  He didn’t know what goodness there was in him, if any, beyond love, and what would all that have secured him if not love?

“Tell me,” Thor said, and he no longer sounded like their father.  He only sounded like himself, and not even his more recent, hardened self, but someone much younger.  “Loki.  Was it Ragnarok?  Or did it only seem so?  Did all that fire turn to gossamer the moment you were away?”

It was the shift to sorrow that told Loki this was, perhaps, the long-delayed answer to Heimdall’s question of how many lives he would have to take before Thor killed him not in battle but in execution: however many an alliance with Hela would have reaped.  A very great total, he supposed.  He could be flattered by that.

He wouldn’t make Thor ask again.  He wasn’t delaying purposely, anyway.  He was only slow.  He too was tired.

“It was Ragnarok, Thor, as foretold.  Your Ragnarok.  As to how I survived raising Surtur, someone not notorious for his gratitude, simply put, I didn’t.  I died.  I was only lucky enough to fall into the Eternal Flame myself.  Though, to be fair, I did think at the last moment to edge a little closer to it, on the off-chance that that ridiculous gambit would actually work.  It burned me, and then it didn’t, and then it did again.  There’s no more to the story than that.”

Well, there was the Tesseract.  A detail.  One he could get to later.

He was the one who had done this, of course, the one who had put himself in a position where it would be eminently reasonable for his brother to doubt he was telling the truth about having _died_ , of all things.

So he was not surprised when Thor said, “Why would you not tell me?” in a tone more doubting than hurt.

“Because it was not the most important thing that happened that day.”

And evidently he was, if no longer capable of feeling outraged, still capable of feeling humiliated, because he could no longer bear it, and the cost of trying was greater than whatever dubious  reward would come from doing so.  He bowed extremely quickly, something he was not in the habit of doing in private and only rarely did even in public, said, “Please excuse me,” and left.

He made it to his chambers and then realized that he wasn’t entitled to them for another two hours.

So much for composure.

“Fuck!”  Loki slammed his hand into the door.  Pain hit his hand like a hot iron.  He did it again.  And again.  He wasn’t sure when he stopped hitting it with his palm and started hitting it with his first and he wasn’t sure when he broke his fingers.

It came to him dimly that the rotating schedules worked in his favor just now, because without them, people would be coming and going all throughout this section of the ship entirely unpredictably.  As it was, he woke only one person, and not even the one whose door he was hammering on, just an elderly woman down the hall who looked at him with her slightly milky eyes and said, “Young man, if you’re trying to knock, you’re doing it very badly.”

He looked down at his bloodied hand.  “I suppose I am.”

“These doors are mostly soundproofed.  Lots of noise in these rooms once, from what I understand.  Happier noise than you’re making.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“I don’t sleep much anymore,” she said dismissively.  “It doesn’t matter.”

She stepped back into her quarters and closed the door.

She had been older than Heimdall—at least in appearance—but he still didn’t like being called young.

 _But you can see how standing in a hallway striking at a closed door may have misled her_.

He took a deep breath and looked down at his hand, watching as green light crept out to stitch him back together again.  His knuckles remained bruised, however, much as the Valkyrie’s mark had stayed on him for a day at least.  Nothing to be done about it.

He went back to the council room.  Conversation stilled as he entered.

He said, “I apologize,” and went and took his seat.  Let them remove him from it if they wanted to.  He would not run again.  He made that vow to himself as if he had not made and broken a thousand similar commandments.

Thor, with the smallest of smiles, said, “In my defense, brother, you once pretended to have drowned yourself in the bath because I ate the last piece of cake from my own name-day party.”

“I was _four_.”

“I should not have spoken to you so,” Thor said quietly, but that wasn’t true, and everyone there knew it.

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Loki said, his face just a little stiff.   _Plaster_.  The collective disappointment of the room was almost palpable, like a draft.  “But then, you were an especially heartless six year-old.”

There was a kind of mumbled, rocky laughter—Thor’s by far the loudest, both the most genuinely convincing and the most determined to convince—and then they subsided back into their dull business, which now seemed to involve quarreling over whether or not Thor should make any kind of diplomatic request for aid from the people of Earth.  They had made bizarrely little progress while he had been gone.  He should have attacked more doors.

It was Banner who looked for him afterwards.  (He was half-sure Thor would have found him first had he not been stretched so thin.  No wonder their father had needed to knock himself out from time to time.  The Odinsleep had probably been the only way for the King of Asgard to get some peace and quiet.)

“Is your hand hurt?”  He spoke brusquely, but the fact of Banner speaking to him at all, when he did not have to, was strange and unnerving.

“No.  Not anymore.”

“You hit something.  Or someone.”

“Something,” Loki said.  “My door.  Because it was someone else’s door.  I have no idea why you’re asking me about this.”

“Because I’m a _doctor_.”

“Go doctor someone else.”

Banner considered this.  “You know something?  I really, really don’t like you.  I mean, it’s not just that you killed a lot of people, although it is actually pretty mind-boggling to me that you are a mass-murderer who is somehow still allowed to do whatever the hell he wants.  It’s also that you’re just _incredibly_ annoying.”

Loki waited for the revelation of why he should care about Banner’s opinion of him.  It did not seem to be forthcoming.

Banner was pinching the bridge of his nose again.  “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”

“Yes,” Loki admitted.

The look Banner was giving him added real substance to his claims of dislike.  “Thor,” he said, stressing the name, “is under the impression that you would benefit from some alone time.  This seems ridiculous to me, just like ninety percent of Thor’s ideas where you’re concerned, but on the sheer off-chance that he’s right and that you carving out an hour a day to yourself would somehow help you or anyone else, you can use my quarters when I’m not in them.”

He had known Banner—for obvious reasons—had his own room on the ship when even Thor did not, but he still didn’t feel that he had any map from that fact to Banner’s decision.

“Wouldn’t you worry about letting me in?” he asked at last.

“No.  Not really.”

“Because you think that I wouldn’t do anything with Thor here.”

“No, because you’re terrified of me.  Did someone punch you in the face the other day?”

“I wouldn’t call it a punch.”

“Great,” Banner said.  “Good talk.”

*

For some reason, the Valkyrie started teaching him to fight.  That was what she called it.

“I know how to fight,” Loki said.

She snorted.  “You forget I fought you myself, Highness.  I’ve seen that fancy footwork of yours.  Very pretty, and, ooh, magic, terrifying, but it didn’t stop you from getting your ass handed to you.”

And all the Valkyrie combat training that ever was hadn’t kept her friends alive.

But if he had not grown any kinder, he at least had grown more perceptive to the gradations of cruelty, so he said only, “Not all of us need to resort to brute force.”

“You do if you lose doing it your way.”

“Maybe it was all part of an elaborate plan.  Lose to you, get taken to Thor, wind up restored as prince of Asgard, heir presumptive, and so on.”

“Funnily enough,” she said, “I’m under the impression your plans don’t tend to work out that well.  Best to just keep failing upwards, really.”  She shrugged, her face calm, indifferent.  “Maybe your heart serves you better than your head.”

“I don’t have a heart.”

“Good,” the Valkyrie said.  “That’ll confound your enemies.  They’ll stab you there and then think, ‘Oh, fuck, why is he still alive?’”

“You’re spending too much time with that rock creature.”

“I’m spending too much time with you.  This conversation is taking ages when I really just wanted an excuse to beat the living shit out of you.  How about it, Highness?”

He folded his arms.  “Tell me why you offer.  Besides the obvious advantage of leaving me with more bruises.”

“You’re such a cranky little shit.”  The Valkyrie sighed.  “Your fate’s a better one than you deserve.  Much better.  So’s mine.  Why not sweat out some of the poison this way?  It’s as good as any other.”

“I see,” Loki said.  Giving in, he began to strip off his outermost tunic.  “You’ve tired yourself out on inanimate objects already and now you’d like to graduate to the living.  Well, be my guest.  I suppose this way, should I attack Thor after all, and you defend him, you’ll have the advantage.”

“That’s the spirit.”

The Valkyrie proved, he had to concede, a fair enough teacher.  It was the only time she seemed to have even a lick of patience to go along with her reluctant interest.  Her voice stayed low, neither friendly nor unfriendly, as she made corrections to his stance and motions and offered, if not praise, at least affirmation.  _Yes, that’s right.  That’s how you want your shoulders.  Left foot a little—there, yeah._

She landed a few deliberate blows to show him his weaknesses, but he could already feel that the bruises would fade with a single touch of magic.  She hadn’t _meant_ them.

“All right,” she said after a while.  “Bewitch me.  Show me how you’d fight an enemy.”

He multiplied himself, illusions spinning out like water shaken off the skin, and each version of himself had a dagger and a smile.

“No more reaching for anyone’s memories?”

“It didn’t work, as I recall.”

“No, all it did was piss me off.  But it’s not like that can’t be valuable under the right circumstances, which I’m sure you know, but you still didn’t do it.  Even with the handy excuse that I all but told you to.  Come on back into yourself, Highness, I think we’re done for the day.”

He collapsed the illusions.  His own self always felt a little stifling after that, a hot and claustrophobic room.  “Cravings gone, then?”

“Mine?  Never.  Yours?”

“I’m not the one who spent the last millennium half-pickled at the bottom of a bottle.”

“What a stupid little boy you are, really,” the Valkyrie said.  “Cravings are cravings, poison’s poison.  I drink mine down, you come by yours naturally.  You’re still deadly and useless if all that wins, so as far as I’m concerned, you’ll sweat it out or, sooner or later, you’ll bleed it out.  I won’t hesitate to put a knife through that nonexistent heart of yours if I think it’ll serve the throne.  It’s just not how I’d rather things go.”

He thought of Heimdall saying that he might do better with activity, that he had _potential_.  Was this entire ship forming a conspiracy to treat him like a child?

_No.  They treat you like they hope you might grow up.  Though not even Thor still risks his heart on that particular wager._

He said, slowly, “I suppose I’d choose sweat over blood.  And if your protection of Thor’s life leads you to protect mine as well, then let joy be unconfined.”

“Not so stupid after all, then,” she said.  She managed to make it sound like a high and well-considered compliment.

“The last time Thor said something like that to me, it was such a milestone that we hugged.  What say you?”  He spread his arms with a mocking smile.

“Thor likes you far better than I do.”

“Who doesn’t?”

She paused to think about it.  “Banner.”

That certainly had the ring of truth.

“Same time tomorrow?” she said, slinging a towel around her neck.  “It’ll do you good.”

“Fine.”

He anticipated not showing up, but something brought him back.  Maybe just the thought that he had, as Thor said, grown predictable: a failure here, a disappointment there.  Yes, surely no one would expect him to become a diligent civil servant, attending council meetings and talking about the fucking water supply.  The sparring sessions were at least some respite from all that, if not as beloved as Banner’s empty quarters.

Though at least a fight seldom broke out into peace in the same way the quiet of an empty room could break out into company.

“Hey,” Banner said.  “Didn’t realize you were in here.”

Loki had been lying on the bunk, shielding his eyes with his forearm.  He disliked the thought of sitting up.  “When I wore Odin’s shape—”

“So we’re going to do this whole storytelling thing.  You’re going to talk at me instead of just leaving.”

“—I do not recall ruling being so everlastingly _dull_.  Thor might shut up one or two of you every now and then.  There’s really nothing like a threatened execution to keep a council in line, but no, he has to be good and noble and long-suffering.  He doesn’t have to require us to suffer with him.”

“That’s a Miltonian set-up for you,” Banner said.  “Better to reign in heaven than serve in Hel.  A little obvious, as far as complaints go.”

“Who is Milton?”

“Earth poet.  Wrote about—you know, this isn’t really my field, and I don’t have time to explain the whole history of Western Christianity to you.  I came in here to take a nap.  I said you could use my room when I’m not here, not that you could lie on my bed bitching about work when I _am_ here.”

Loki stood.  “I should think you’d be less touchy knowing we’re Earthbound.  Certainly I would be, if that were _my_ final destination.”

He turned to leave, but Banner caught his wrist.

Loki turned a dagger against him.

“Can you not do that?” Banner said, letting go.  “You are my least favorite person to accidentally bump into in the halls.  You’re like a porcupine.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“So chickens but no porcupines, great, I’ll pass that on to the xenobiologists.”

It took Loki a moment to decipher that—Asgardian henhouses—and then he said, stiffly, “You’d be better served passing it along to the historians, would you not?”

Banner sighed.  He looked less worn than Thor, but more uncomfortable by far— _good_ —and he had the look of someone who was grimly preparing himself to tackle a mess both filthy and enormous.  He would apologize, he would offer some kind of conciliatory gesture he would immediately regret, Loki would gleefully take advantage of it…

Instead, Banner said, “I realize this question sounds ridiculous, but why don’t you want to go to Hel?”

“We aren’t friends.  I hardly owe you insight into my thought process.”

“God, no, and I hope you don’t get in the habit of offering it, but in this one particular instance, I’m curious.  Call it a tax on the bedroom.”

That at least was a logic he could understand.  Though it brought him no closer to opening himself up.  The Valkyrie was wrong to say he was full of poison: he was full of nothing so simple.  He was made, as Banner himself well knew, of snakes and daggers, thoughts and longings all untrustworthy, slippery, and razor sharp.  He could not remember having a smooth, untroubled surface, let alone untroubled depths.  He seethed.  He wanted.  He had no direction.

To his surprise, he said, “Whatever it used to be, Hel is a prison.  A place for the dead and the forgotten.  There’s no fresh start there, there’s no novelty.  It’s not a place to begin again.”

“It might work fine as a place to continue.”

“Asgard has fallen, long live Asgard?”  He laughed shortly.  “Believe me, as someone who enjoys a good opportunity to die and then return, that sort of thing is of _limited_ appeal.  I don’t want to be—”

He stopped.

Banner considered this.  On occasion, his gaze held neither panic nor threat, and that was when Loki most feared him.  It was this level of ice, so cold it burned, that, he was sure, let Banner slip in and out of monstrosity as easily as if he were stepping in and out of his shoes.  The gaze of his profession: pure observation stripped of both worry and wishful thinking.  Heimdall’s eyes.

Then he said, “If you can actually shut up for an hour at a time and let me sleep, you can stay in here.  If I’m asleep, you’re not bothering me and I’m not bothering you.  The big guy snores, but I don’t.  Win-win.”

“And you just propose that I entertain myself with your belongings?”

“I don’t own any of this crap, it came with the room.  There’s a vibrating butt plug over in the corner if you want to really go wild, though in that case you _definitely_ have to wait until I’m asleep.  I don’t know, Loki, use the space-computer I can only barely figure out how to turn on.  Decide what to do about this week’s latest crisis.”

*

“You’ve made friends,” Thor said the next time they were alone.

“Don’t be so insulting.”

“No, I am honestly impressed.  I’ve been putting you and Banner on opposite ends of the longest table in this damn ship thinking you’d tear each other’s throats out if you were left any closer than that, but I hear otherwise.  And that you're training with the Valkyrie, no less.”

“I’d train with you if you had time,” Loki pointed out.  “She’s a necessary convenience.”

“And I your first choice?  I’m honored.”

“Please shut up.”

“That’s no way to talk to your king.”  Thor closed his eyes.  “I still hope, you know, to wake up and find I’ve dreamt all this.  I find you on Asgard staging inane dramas, reveal your deception—”

“Nearly smash a hammer into my face.”

“—we go to Earth and find Father and that’s the end of it.  It’s an excellent dream.”

_Not for me.  Not to end unmasked and before Odin once again, like a child caught red-handed.  What is there for me in this dream, Thor?  Another featureless dungeon?  Should I say I’d rather have that, and Asgard spared, then this?_

“I for one am partial to Hela, in a manner of speaking,” he said.  “It was nice to know certain things: that I was not, in fact, the blackest sheep in Odin’s fold, and that he begat her himself.  That I am not—the way I am—because of—”  He held up his hand and let frost ice his fingers.  It was something he seldom did voluntarily.  He disliked, most of the time, the way his hand did not grow cold, the way some part of him found refreshment in this magic.  “As you see.”

“You do come off better in comparison,” Thor admitted.  “Asgard was, I think, the one world you’d have kept yourself from destroying, whatever happened.  You might include Jotunheim in that tally, brother.”

“And Hel?”

“I take what is left of Asgard to Hel,” Thor said.  “I do not require you to go with it, I only… ask.  I’ve missed you a little.  Sometimes.  Not very often.”

“I’m sure.”

“But, you know, occasionally.  It’s been a long time, Loki.  I’d rather live with you than without, but I won’t force you.”

“You _can’t_ force me.”

“Oh, I think I could if I put my mind to it.”

“Not in this condition you couldn’t,” Loki said.  He evaluated Thor—the age in his eyes, the slump in his shoulders—and stood before he had time to regret what he was thinking of doing.  He summoned the ice back to his hand and, not without hesitation, laid it against Thor’s brow.  He kept the touch slight, just enough to cool, just enough to allow his magic to seep in with it, the potion in the sugar water.

He could feel the bramble tangle inside Thor’s mind, the fatigue and the worry and the heaviness of the crown, and it took all there was in him to separate out the strands—to _make_ himself separate out the strands—and ease the hurt without clouding the rest.  No play with memories here.  He’d deposed one king—well, two, depending on how you looked at it—but he would not do so again.  Something new here.  A broken pattern.

He took his hand back to his side.

“Thank you,” Thor said, meeting his eyes steadily and without mistrust.  “I haven’t slept through the night, or whatever we’re calling the night lately, since we boarded.”

“It isn’t a cure-all, merely a bandage.  A short-term solution to a long-term problem.  I can’t keep you going if you insist on running yourself ragged.”  He made himself smile.  “At least now you’ll be in fit condition to fight me, should the occasion call for it.  I _do_ , however, have another short-term—well, relatively—solution to a long-term problem, if you’re interested.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Convince Banner to train under Heimdall.”

Thor frowned.  “In… what, exactly?”

“Seeing.  Visions.  Reconstructing the Bifrost.  I don’t give a damn.  Heimdall wanted to claim a successor as far back as when we were children, he’ll be especially eager for one now.  Banner has… something.”

“The Midgardians call it ‘science.’”

“Yes, well, what do they know?  You’ve seen what they call food.  Banner sees.  Heimdall can help him see further, deeper.”

“Banner wants to return home,” Thor said.  “What is his incentive to stay?  Commanding his ship doesn’t make me his king.”

“Heimdall has self-control to burn.  Banner will like that.”

“It’s an unusual idea,” Thor said.  “Unconventional, even for you.  But not unworkable.  What made you think of it?”

He sometimes forgot Thor wasn’t the brutish, slow-witted shadow he cast across the worst pits in Loki’s own mind.  Thor would want to know, of course, as he’d wanted to know everything else, since Loki had first betrayed him, first given him reason to be curious.  Though this was somehow different.  This felt not new but old.  So that soil could grow something, still.

“Heimdall and I spoke once about what he had looked for in an apprentice.  Someone who would serve Asgard well.  Our options are far fewer now, but Banner is the best of them.”

_Since I cannot do it myself._

_Since I cannot trust myself enough to even fairly argue that I should._

Thor said, “Not you, Loki?”

Of all the times for his smile to become genuine.  “No, not me, thank you.  Maybe when I was a child.  My mind is different now.  Banner, on the other hand, is so young by our standards he’s practically made out of raw dough, he can be reshaped however we like.”

“However _he_ likes.”

“Isn’t that what I said?” Loki said innocently.

Thor rolled his eyes, and it occurred to Loki that this was a gesture Thor was now free to make nowhere else, and in no other company.  There was some comfort there.  Something he could hold tightly in his hand, the part of his childhood that he wasn’t required to let go of.  Perfectly smooth, perfectly whole.  A seed waiting to crack open.  Potential.

Potential destined to be interrupted, evidently: the klaxons sounded off one by one.

“No peace at all,” Thor said, standing.  “You don’t have another whack of magic you could use to just knock me out, do you?”

“I could usurp the throne,” Loki said.  “As a standing offer.”

“I’m giving it serious consideration.”

“And I do not _whack_.  I have a delicate touch, very precise.”

Thor buckled his cloak.  “You _are_ coming, aren’t you, brother?”

“In the absence of any better entertainment,” Loki said.  “We might as well see what fool would take on the throne of Asgard.”


End file.
